I want to sit down and try to refine some of the ideas on offer in the thread so far; but in the meantime, there are some pretty nice pics over on Adam Turner's Photobucket page (and on ADB's Facebook page, which you can more or less browse without having to login or register) which might help gauge just how big that Dominator in the opening post truly is. This one, Andromeda Attacks, really deserves to be printed in colour somewhere; even so, that same model has graced the covers of FC: War and Peace, plus SFB modules G3 and Omega 5.

Power-Absorber Panels: Instead of shields, Andromedan ships use a series of power-absorber panels; capable of converting the energy from incoming weapons fire into a state which, over time, the Andromedan ship can attempt to dissipate (or even use to power its own weapons!). However, this system comes at a price; should the panel generators be over-run, the subsequent release of energy can trigger a cascading effect, tearing the ship apart.

Incoming non-critical hits reduce the Andromedan ship’s Power-Absorber Panel score; critical hits bypass the panels as if they were shields. (Shield criticals count against the panels as normal; this represents degradation of the panel banks incurred over the course of a battle.)

Power-Absorber panels have a split value, akin to the Damage score of the ship proper; the first value shows the starting panel score, while the second indicates a level at which the panel banks are "compromised" (in that the amount of energy stored in the panels is high enough to risk a cascading effect). Should a critical hit be scored once the Panel score has been reduced to (or below) this secondary score, the level of this critical hit will be increased by +1.

Andromedan ships cannot use the Boost Energy to Shields! Special Action. Instead, in the End Phase, they may dissipate some of this energy into space; this increases the current Panel score by one-tenth of the ship’s starting Panel score, but cannot go over the ship’s starting total. If a Mothership has one or more Satellite Ships in its hangar bay, it may also choose to transfer a further amount of panel damage to each of these Satellite Ships, up to one-tenth of the starting Panel scores of each. (The Satellite Ships in turn cannot dissipate this energy while they are still in the hangar bay; they must be launched first.) The other means of transferring energy seen in Federation Commander or Star Fleet Battles are abstracted into the overall ship operations in A Call to Arms: Star Fleet.

Power-Absorber Panels block the use of enemy Transporters, but do not obstruct the use of an Andromedan ship’s own Transporters (or a “friendly” Transporter operation between two allied Andromedan units). Note that allied Motherships may not transport Satellite Ships from one to another; the Satellite Ship must be launched by one Mothership before it can be recovered by the other.

In addition, due to their “disruptive” effect on Power-Absorber Panels, any Disruptor Attack Dice successfully fired against Andromedan units with active panels gain the Precise trait for that instance of fire.

-----

And an attempt to tidy up the DisDev rules, again based on storeylf's ideas.

Displacement Device: The key to Andromedan logistical operations, the mysterious Displacement Device both acted as a highly unorthodox tactical system in its own right, as well as providing Andromedan ships with the ability to travel along the Rapid Transit Network laid within (and between) galaxies.

Instead of using a Special Action, the Andromedan player may expend each Attack Die from its his Displacement Devices in one of the following manners:

Self-Displacement
If used upon itself, the operating unit may be placed anywhere within 12 inches of its starting position, retaining its original facing.

Friendly Displacement
If used upon a friendly Andromedan unit within 12 inches, the operating unit may place the friendly ship anywhere anywhere within 6 inches of that unit's starting position, retaining its original facing.

Offensive Displacement
If used offensively against an enemy ship within 12 inches, roll a D6 to determine if the device successfully displaces the target or not. On the roll of a 1, 2, 3 or 4, the target is displaced D6 inches in the F, A, P or S directions respectively; on a roll of 5 or 6, the Attack Die is lost, and the target ship remains in place.

Satellite Ship Launch
In addition, an Andromedan Mothership may place one of the Satellite Ships in its own hangar bay anywhere within 5 inches of the Mothership, facing in any direction.

A displaced ship cannot fire or launch weapons (offensively; it may still fire defensively); nor may it use tractor beams, labs, or transporters.

If this movement takes the ship into an asteroid field, do not roll for collision. If the displaced ship emerges inside a planet or moon, it is immediately destroyed. However, a Displacement Device may not be used to displace a target into a smaller object (such as another ship); if a ship is already in the same location, its base and that of the displaced ship are placed in contact with each other. Ships with the Immobile Trait cannot be displaced.

No more than two Andromedan ships, be they Motherships or Satellite Ships, may actively operate their Displacement Devices simultaneously. (If three ships attempt to activate these devices in the same encounter, all three will be immediately dragged into a tear in the fabric of subspace.) If an Andromedan player has more than two ships equipped with Displacement Devices in a given scenario (perhaps to represent prior units arriving in the region along the RTN, then de-activating their devices in order to allow reinforcements to arrive) he must nominate which two ships have their devices active; no other Displacement Device-equipped ship may operate unless one or both of these operating ships are destroyed (or otherwise leave the map). Should this come to pass, dormant Displacement Devices may be activated on the subsequent turn, though must be “reloaded” before use; the two-ship-per-battle limit still applies. (Note that Andromedan units with the Immobile Trait do not count towards this limit.)

An Andromedan ship can only successfully disengage from a given scenario if it has a Displacement Device; any other units (be they Motherships or Satellite Ships) which attempt to disengage without an active device are considered to be destroyed.

-----

If these look good, I can go back and edit the provisional stats for the Conquistador and Cobra accordingly.

Also, since all Andro ships have robotic crews, would it be fair to give all of their ships the Enhanced Bridge Trait?

One other thing that might need to be added for the PA Panels; rules covering how they work in a nebula. In FC, a relatively recent errata item added in a specific set of effects of a nebula on active panels; each panel holds only 6 points of power per box instead of 10, while each panel box incurs a point of energy from the nebula itself twice during the course of a turn. (This causes PA panels to fill up quite quickly; making running PA panels in a nebula quite a dicey proposition.)

Now, in theory, something similar could be done here; have the starting PA Panel score reduced by two-fifths, and have a certain amount lost each turn from the nebula's effects. But on the other hand, one could simply say that the pre-existing rule works fine; since, presumably, an Andro captain faced with such a buildup would simply not bother to turn his/her/its panels on at all.

So, should it just be ignored for now?

-----

Also, I wanted to touch on the issue of Andro logistics; crucial for understanding the way in which the Invasions are run.

The Andromedans do things quite differently than your average extra-galactic "visitor". If you had a look at, say, the Seltorians, you can get a fair idea of how, and why, they run their Tribunal expeditions the way they do; why the Hives can build only so many different sizes of ship compared to their Home Galaxy fleet yards; what kind of long-term game plan (i.e. to kill Tholians) the Tribunal forces themselves have planned, and so on and so forth.

However, with the Andros, we have no idea what is going on back in the M31 Galaxy; and we probably never will. What we know is derived from data gathered over the course of three theatres of war (in the Alpha and Omega Octants, plus the Lesser Magellanic Cloud), but there is still a lot that remains a mystery. (In game terms, hopefully the eventual development of the Andromedan War module for Federation and Empire can help with some of this; but even it would be likely to only offer so much about this enigmatic foe.)

The main thing we do know is that, for strategic purposes, the Rapid Transit Network is crucial to Andromedan operations. There seems to be two scales of RTN; the "inter-galactic" network anchored by an active Desecrator starbase on "our" end, plus the "intra-galactic" network joined together by hundreds of Satellite Bases.

(When I say "intra-galactic", it doesn't quite cover everything; the Andros did use chains of Satellite Bases to link their holdings in the Cloud with their entry points into the Milky Way. However, this is still more of a "local" branch, compared to the "trunk line" going all the way back to Andromeda.)

In terms of the actual bases themselves, the smallest you generally see is a standard Satellite Base; roughly the size of a Cobra medium satellite ship. The Base Station and Battle Station are made by taking two of these Satellite Bases (or three, in the dcase of the BATS) and joining them together with a core module of the same size. (This is not a coincidence; the size of a Satbase allows a Mothership to carry one or more inert bases within their internal hangar bays. Indeed, a handful of Mothership variants have larger hangars than normal, specifically to allow them to carry out this role.) However, the Desecrator starbases themselves cannot be built like this; while a Mothership can carry certain components for one, an Andromedan starbase must be assembled the old-fashioned way.

When it comes to production facilities, the Andros don't have that many of them. They can build Satellite Ships at the Desecrator, or at a construction variant of their battle stations; but, apprently, all of their Motherships had to come all the way from Andromeda itself. (The only exception was found during Operation Unity, when a "spare" Desecrator starbase was uncovered; it had been re-purposed to build the first known Devastator battleship, but had only gotten just over half of the construction work done by the time it was found.)

This can be seen in the timeline for the LMC. The first wave of Motherships slogged across the near-void between Andromeda and the Cloud, arriving in the Cloud one (or two) per year from Y138 to Y145. While the more combat-oriented Motherships worked to secure a safe area of operations, the support Mothership started work on building the first Desecrator in Y139; completing its task in Y145. Once the starbase was finished, it could turn on its "trunk line" RTN node, allowing the next waves of Motherships to arrive far more quickly; while the Motherships in turn could then be used to start placing Satellite Bases in the region, allowing the Andromedans to begin their acts of conquest against the indigenous Magellanic empires from Y146 onwards.

(Had the Magellanics uncovered the Andromedans sooner, they could have tried to strangle the invasion in its cradle; unfortunately, by the time they knew what was going on, they were stuck with trying to drive the invaders out the hard way.)

As the timeline states, there were actually three Desecrators in the LMC; the first was destroyed by the Magellanic powers, the second was crippled (but not destroyed) in a later effort, while the third was untouched until Operation Unity in Y202. (The second Desecrator had apparently been more or less abandoned until Y200, at which point it was tasked with constructing that Devastator.)

So long story short; kill the smaller bases, disrupt the network; kill the starbases, cut off the "trunk line" back to Andromeda.

-----

So, I wanted to offer a sample Satellite Base; I used the Ship Card in Communiqué #55, with the notes in the FC Reference Rulebook about adding the special sensors back in.

SATELLITE BASE (SATB) - 150 POINTS

The critical element of the Rapid Transit Network, each Satellite Base acted as a beacon allowing Andromedan units equipped with Displacement Devices to travel across the network at Warp 15; providing an unparalleled degree of strategic mobility to the invaders. As their many enemies gradually learned to disrupt the RTN by destroying as many bases as they could find, the Andromedans attempted to counter these efforts by relocating uncovered bases, upgrading them to base stations or battle stations, or deploying more forces to defend them.

*The Satellite Ship value refers to the "dead weight" of the base when transported in an inactive state by a Mothership; a Satellite Base cannot be activated (or de-activated) in the course of a scenario.

-----

There might need to be a note clarifying that "inactive" = "target".

(In scenario terms, this would only really crop up if you can catch a Mothership in the midst of transporting one or more SatBases; which may be useful in a campaign, but only in very particular circumstances.)

-----

This unit shows the tricks that can arise with the conversion process.

On the Ship Card, the phasers have LF+L, RF+R and RA firing arcs. If you translated them too conservatively, you'd end up with P, S and A arcs; leaving the F arc exposed. On the other hand, if you left the RA arc as A, but went with F, P and F, S for the others, you'd end up with an unbalancing overlap in the F arc "corner" of the base. So, I cheated a bit and gave all three "corners" 180-degree arcs.

Also, the Panels are a bit tricky. For smaller bases (and ships), the FC ship Cards only have two facings; so all incoming fire in the front three shield facings hit the same front panel. So, the panel scores I've done up so far are all based on the "#2 facing". However, larger Andro bases actially have six discrete panel banks; so, in essence, the base below should have three times the overall protection than the standard Satellite Base.

The problem is, that technically, the "#2 facing" is still only 60 points' worth...

So, I included an aggregate of all three panels in the front hemisphere in parentheses; I'm not sure if it should be used instead of the "direct" translation. (Given how much the base costs, the lower number might be a tad low...)

-----

BATTLE STATION (BATS) - 750 POINTS

The most powerful RTN node which the Andromedans could assemble out of Satellite Bases, the Battle Station took three such bases and joined them to a central core module of the same size. The configuration of the base meant that two of the Heavy Tractor-Repulsor Beams from each Satellite Base module were unable to operate (being blocked by the core module); even so, the Battle Station’s concentration of available firepower still proved daunting to would-be attackers.

*The Satellite Ship value refers to the total "dead weight" of the four component modules when transported in an inactive state by a Mothership; a Battle Station cannot be assembled or activated (or disassembled or de-activated) in the course of a scenario.

To go back to the "dark future" for a moment; I've taken the opportunity presented by the change in TR rules to have a go at the Dissection Beam.

-----

Dissection Beams: When the Federation survey cruiser Darwin returned from the dark future of Andromedan victory, it carried records of an Andromedan weapon identified as “Dissection Beams.” Historically, no ships appeared armed with this weapon after the Darwin returned in Y195 through the conclusion of Operation Unity in Y202. Perhaps it was a weapon the Andromedans were developing, but were forced to drop due to changes in the timeline? On this, the record is silent. If a Dissection Beam is fired at a target which the firing ship has already managed to latch onto via a Tractor Beam, the weapon gains the Accurate +2 Trait. Further, any Critical Hits scored by the Dissection Beam cannot be repaired during the course of a scenario; the affected systems are literally shorn off the target vessel, and must be replaced at a major shipyard (if the ship survives to tell the tale, that is). Unlike a Tractor-Repulsor Beam, a Dissection Beam cannot be used as a Tractor Beam. Dissection Beams cannot be overloaded.

One of the four Dissection Beam-armed Motherships identified in the data brought back by the Darwin, the Extractor gave up all of the hangar capacity of the Conquistador to mount a single such weapon. It remained, for its size, a reasonably effective raider because it retained two Heavy Tractor-Repulsor Beams in addition to its full Phaser array. When tested in simulator exercises in the “main” timeline, command trainees often found themselves with the difficult choice of using their Tractor-Repulsor Beams as weapons to hit a target, or as Tractor Beams to ensnare a target to be hammered by the Dissection Beam. While capable of independent raids, it was most often used in the simulators as a supporting unit for a larger Mothership.

Also, I had another look at the Devourer, the DSB variant of the Devastator battleship; its point value would come to just under a thousand points by itself, and would have room for seven Cobra-sized SatShips. So, even if you have a "soft" or "hard" limit based on DisDev use, the Andromedans might not have too many problems filling out a decent-sized fleet list...

-----

One idea for trying out the Andromedans might be to consider a take on the Three Against Cortez scenario.

Basically, take the Conquistador Cortez, complete with a Cobra, and try its luck against the D7 Chieftain, the D5 Reaper and the F5 War Demon. Historically, the Cortez disengaged after the Cobra was destroyed, leaving two of the Klingon ships badly crippled; if a similar result can be generated in ACtA:SF without too much hassle, things may be on the right track rules-wise.

(And if you wanted to try a larger battle, maybe see what happens if Cortez Phones a Fiend?)

That's two copies of CL49 (one in LPE for day-to-day use, and another in regular size for safe keeping), the CL49 supplemental file, the SFB Federation Master Starship Book, the print editions of the FC Omega and LMC playtest packs, and a trio of indvidual FC Ship Cards (Fast Naval Transport, ISC Fast Cruiser, and Andromedan Recon Cobra).

As noted on the front cover, CL49 includes a history article looking at the Andromedan War, which was inspired by an older article covering the General War written quite a ways back. It also includes a new article exploring the Intergalactic Trunk Line, which (we think) the Andros may have used in order to get to the Milky Way (and possiby to other galaxies).

I should note that the Andro history article (but not the shorter ITL piece) was written by myself, as were the rule portions of the playtest Omega and LMC files for Federation Commander. So my apologies to anyone who may find those documents wanting.

Of course, with version 1.2 close at hand, the speculation on how the Invaders might be handled in ACtA:SF may be somewhat out of date. But hopefully the new incarnation of the game engine will provide an even more appropriate venue for the would-be extra-galactic conquerors to provide something new and unque to the gaming table.

a thought on displacement devices.. instead of saying "only 2 ships can have them", why not have a max number of dice from them that can be used each turn?

so for example, perhaps a max of 6 dice (or 8 or 10, whatever balances well) from disdev's can be used a turn. this would also allow smaller disdev's to be used more often.. because if you only have 1 or 2 disdev dice on ship (like that Python and conquistador with only 1), you could still fit them in along with the larger motherships and still get to use them, or you can take more of the smaller ships and have more active disdevs.

if you have more total disdev dice in your force than you can use in a turn, you just pick which ships get to use them that turn.. and next turn, you could always pick different ships to use them, so long as the # of total dice does not exceed the limit.

mithril wrote:a thought on displacement devices.. instead of saying "only 2 ships can have them", why not have a max number of dice from them that can be used each turn?

so for example, perhaps a max of 6 dice (or 8 or 10, whatever balances well) from disdev's can be used a turn. this would also allow smaller disdev's to be used more often.. because if you only have 1 or 2 disdev dice on ship (like that Python and conquistador with only 1), you could still fit them in along with the larger motherships and still get to use them, or you can take more of the smaller ships and have more active disdevs.

if you have more total disdev dice in your force than you can use in a turn, you just pick which ships get to use them that turn.. and next turn, you could always pick different ships to use them, so long as the # of total dice does not exceed the limit.

That's the logical approach that scales up better with points as well.

BTW not knowledgeable on fluff so what's the background reason for the limit in the first place?

Not super familiar with their fluff, but from what i understand, an Active Disdev is supposed to put some kind of strain on the fabric of space, such that you can't have too many active in one place.

what i find odd about this though is that that same device is, AFICT, supposed to be how the ships use that "Galactic Transit Network" they use to get around the galaxy fast. if your limited in how many can be in one place, that would suggest that the number of ships in an Andro fleet would be limited when moving strategically too. certainly their mothership aspect on the bigger ships helps offset that (letting the big ships carry their own escorts around) but compared to the size of fleets that the other factions can throw at them, the Andro's having to deploy all strung out or in drips and drabs strategically seems odd.

then again, i might have overlooked some detail about the GTN use that overrides the weapon use limit.